The most secure method would probably be sony HD-MD if that weren't discontinued. MO-Drives are more reliable than DVDs, but for any reasonable effort that is probably the best thing.

I have dozens of these. Wanna buy? Only problem is that they are extremely slow when writing data, and limited to 1GB each. I also have an enormous box full of SD-MD discs, and some even have music on them.

If you're going to be a small time farmer, you need to carve out a niche and grow something unusual or uncommon, and market it as such. I have friends in Indiana that have a tiny (less than 1 acre) backyard plot, and grow at least 5 varieties of tomatoes, and several less-common varieties of other vegetables. They put them on a roadside stand with a donation box, and instructions as to the recommended cost per pound, and regularly pull in much more than the value of the vegetables. Of course, there are those that will take the produce and walk, but that is outweighed by those that overpay for what they do get.

It's not sustainable and wasn't meant to be, but it could easily be if they felt like putting additional effort into it. Right now it's just a hobby that pulls in several thousands per month.

I'm sure you will have no trouble explaining why you are using a trusted member's -otc rating in your signature, and a slight variation on his name?

I demand that you sign a message using the key ID 357F695B9F0E529C or the bitcoin address 17QAPwXnqXX771j2CB7y2ahuoX76X4aipv saying that you are the same user as https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?action=profile;u=33781 and that you have a damned good reason for showing up with a similar name.

There are a number of possibilities, including dirty power at your location as the most likely suspect. Transients, harmonics and brownouts will reduce the lifespan of PSUs, and such anomalies can be caused by a number of factors including under-spec wiring, large motors being started, unfiltered VFD/inverter drives, other inductive loads such as UPS units, and more.

It's also possible that some component in your systems is causing an issue, such as component(s) with inordinately high leakage causing out-of-spec power draw and additional heat.

PS: To the Bitcoiners in this thread - this is how merchants feel. We should be doing more listening and less arguing. He already had a challenging experience, and we aren't going to convince him that it is actually simple and easy (it isn't). We are lucky to have a merchant with the patience to wade through all these replies, most would have given up already.

^ THISWe need to do less theorizing and arguing, and start creating more solutions.

Some ideas for a collections of little tools for merchants to use, that I don't think are available yet:

A script to pull a pre-generated address from a database table, and present it to the user when ordering. Should be able to trigger an email to the admin when the number of remaining addresses is reduced.

A script to securely generate new addresses in bulk, and dump the keys to a wallet format while adding the addresses to the aforementioned table. Used for occasional ("quarterly"?) maintenance. For merchants that want it, it could instead store everything in the database for instant transactions.

A script to instantly create a transaction from a zero-confirm incoming transaction that forwards to another wallet (the exchange, or maybe the cold wallet first). It could have the ability to split the payout between 2 or more addresses by a percentage or other factor. Whether this script actually sends coins would be determined by whether the merchant wants to keep all of its private keys online, or whether it wants to run the transactions in a batch occasionally on a different box. This script would ideally interface with a separate hardware device that has yet to be designed.

A script to pull data from several exchanges in order to calculate an exchange rate. It should also consider depth, especially for expensive items. This could also interface with the previous point in order to determine which exchange to trade on.

A script to perform a simple trade on an exchange. It could optionally perform a trade upon receipt of a zero confirm transaction, using funds stored on the exchange already, in order to lock in the rate.

I'm sure there are other tools that should be available, but some kind of reference implementation of each of the above in various languages would be ideal for merchants and such as a starting point.

Actually I think it would be useful if the forum software would enable that automatically upon account creation, although that could lead to ballooning disk space.

If you made it the default, you'd need to set up a system which alerted users when their PM box was getting close to the limit. Someone's inbox being constantly full is more annoying than them not having PMs enabled and it leads to a shitload of "empty your inbox" threads.

Well, I've used forums where there is a limit on the number of PMs, and frankly it is downright annoying. I'm not sure if there is a limit in the current system, but I haven't hit it and I keep all my communications.

If there was going to be a limit, I would like a way to export PMs to a .csv dump file, and possibly even have the export signed by the forum for safekeeping.

Also on a slightly off-topic-ish tangent, I also use a feature of the current software extensively - that of Labels. They can be used as folders by adding a label and then removing the inbox label. So for instance, you could set up labels for "processed" or "hardware sales", and then add one or more labels to a message. Once you remove the Inbox label, it disappears out of the Inbox, but remains accessible in the other label sections. Unfortunately, this can't be done with outgoing sent messages.

There will be a total of 21 million coins. With eight decimals on top of it, we have a total of 2.1E15 indivisible units of account. This is a big number, you know. To put it in perspective, the total of all gold ever mined in the history of humankind is about 150,000 tonnes, or 1.5E11 grams, or 1.5E14 mg of gold. Ever mined. There are fourteen times more bitcoin units than milligrams of gold ever mined. In current prices, one mg of gold is worth about four US cents.

That's a pretty damned cool statistic that I did not know about. Thanks for that information.

Nope, NFC is more insecure that QR. QR is low tech but if implemented properly, can give you decent security and it is easy to use and it open sourced. That has a lot of advantages. I still think NFC will take off but I personally will not use it and I request all my cards without that RFID tap and go stuff removed.

Dalkore

In the same vein, NFC can certainly be more secure if implemented properly. Using an NFC device as a way to store a secret is an ideal use-case.

Actually, "Staff" does have meaning outside of those sections. Staff members have access to a special "Staff" board where forum moderation is discussed.

Thanks for the info. I rarely visit Newbies and have it blocked in my preferences, so I didn't notice that.Looks like I might need to make a small edit to the "rankings" post of mine in Newbies, as well then.

He makes personal attacks, harasses posters and shits-up threads to such an extent that he has a protection-racket pay-off address in his signature which he uses to regularly solicit donations to get him to stop. He also has a bright-orange ignore button, clearly indicating the number of people who are sick of his crap.

Why is he granted a privileged position on this board? He would be considered a troll anywhere else.

How about searching a little bit before posting a duplicate thread/complaint?

The answer is that he is only a moderator in the Spanish (or Portugese?) section because he speaks that language. "Staff" has no meaning outside of the sections that he moderates.

You know what, you 3 have no idea how to run a business. At least not a exchange, where open and hones communication and speed of transactions are the 2 cornerstones (yes, there are many more). I like to buy your exchange and reboot this under a new management. You guys have failed miserably. I like to make it work before you 3 fuck this one up too badly.We all be happy - you got rid of something you obviously do not care for, clients will be happy because they get better service and I'll be happy running this nice BTC/EUR/GBP/etc exchange, servicing EU countries like never before.

You 3 can stay on board until the code and financial audits are completed. After that... adios amigos.

Do it. I wanna see how good you are at running something like this.

Actually, if you are serious about it you would build and start your own. That way, you would know how to fix something when it breaks. Otherwise, you have to pick through someone else's system and try to figure out what he was thinking when he built it.

I see where you are confused about it now. What the person who solved it did was not decryption or reversing - their process would have been somewhat like the following:

1. Determine the type of number, if possible. In this case, it is a valid MD5 hash. (This is assumed because an MD5 hash is typically represented as a 32-bit hexadecimal number)2. Attempt to hash arbitrary strings using MD5 to find out whether they match the number.

This person probably tried several bits of data, one of which was the actual original information (the mission statement). Since a hash is supposed to be deterministic (it produces the same output from a given input, no matter how many times you do it), he got a hash that matched what he was looking for and could therefore assume that his input data was the same as their input data, and that he had solved the puzzle.